Sunday, March 24, 2013

This release offers some great new features including the long anticipated GeoScript editor (thanks to HydroloGIS), a full featured graticule map decoration (thanks to Kenneth Gulbrandsoy), and a new Document view (thanks to LISAsoft).

Thanks to Galdos, lat-lon and LISAsoft for their participation in OWS9. Their extensive quality assurance work has allowed uDig to enable WMS 1.3.0 by default.

On the development front the SDK now functions as standalone target platform complete with Eclipse and GeoTools source code. Thanks to Sam Guymer for this work, and to community members Suraj Patil and Thomas Dolley for testing. We also offer our congratulations to Kenneth Gulbrandsoy for his promotion to committer status.

The release is issued under a dual EPL and BSD license and marks our initial contribution to LocationTech. No further releases are scheduled under the Refractions banner.

Release Details

About uDig 1.4.0

License Transition Complete

The uDig project has changed to a dual BSD / EPL license. This license is in support of our application to LocationTech (an Eclipse Foundations industry working group).

GeoScript Editor

This release offers some great new features including the long anticipated GeoScript editor. The use of scripting within a GIS application affords a great middle ground between developers and users. The GeoScript project is focused on taming the power of GIS for dynamic scripting languages. This strong focus on ease-of-use makes for an excellent alignment with the uDig project.

Document View

The use of feature attributes as a jumping off point for a document, web page or script action is known as a hot-link, while the concept of an attachment is well-known from the use of email. uDig provides the innovative combination of these two ideas in a single Document view.

As part of this work, dynamic feature labels can be defined (used by the Info Tool and Document view).

About uDig 1.4 Series

The 1.4 series brings several exciting new features to the table while serving as a stepping stone for the project's migration to LocationTech.

The list of developers on that page will grow as we get around to filling in our paperwork. There is also a happy "egg" logo next to our project as we are currently "in incubation". Our mentors for this process are Benjamin Cabe and Wayne Beaton.

A big thanks to the uDig team, the helpful people on the location-tech email list, and the Eclipse staff who helped make this happen.

About LocationTechLocationTech is the Eclipse Foundation industry working group for "location aware" technologies. It is a great fit for the uDig project with our technology stack being based on Eclipse RCP.

The Eclipse Foundation is a vendor neutral, member support non-profit Foundation. We look forward to participating, making friends in the Eclipse community and joining in LocationTech's out reach to industry.

What is Next
The uDig team is busy filling in the paperwork to access LocationTech facilities, and will be migrating the codebase shortly.

One of the initial benefits is access to the Eclipse Foundation intellectual property services. While we are confident our codebase is in good shape, the review by the independent IP team is an important step for the uDig project. The costs associated with intellectual property services is a prohibitive constraint on the adoption of open source in general. The completion of this review for the uDig project lowers risk for everyone involved and makes the project easier to deploy.

We have also enjoyed taking part in the LocationTech industry out reach including a recent video presentation on uDig by Jody Garnett and Frank Gasdorf.

Sneak Peek
While we wait the team will continue working on the 1.4.0 release which will be our last release under the Refractions banner. If you would like a sneak peak, the documentation is online, including the What is New page.